The federal panel behind the cancer screening recommendations hasn’t met in nearly a year

The joint working group that formulates recommendations for cancer screening, heart disease prevention and other preventive services has not met for nearly a year — and it’s unclear if the panel will meet again.

The US Preventive Services Task Force, formed in 1984, is an independent panel of volunteer doctors, nurses and public health experts that reviews the latest scientific research and decides which preventive care should be covered at no cost to patients.

Under the Affordable Care Act, most private insurers must cover services that receive an A or B in the applicable range. More than 150 million people with private insurance — including 37 million children — are covered by the provision, according to a 2022 report by the Department of Health and Human Services. The law also applies to about 20 million seniors enrolled in Medicaid and 61 million seniors in Medicare.

The working group usually meets to vote three times a year – in March, July and November. It last met in March 2025. The July meeting was canceled, and the November meeting was canceled due to the government shutdown. No meeting has been announced for next month.

The panel also works with fewer members. Five of the members’ terms expired at the end of last year and were never made public, leaving the appointed panel with 11 members instead of the usual 16.

Dr. Alex Krist, who chaired the panel from 2020 to 2021, said several draft recommendations are pending, including revisions to cervical cancer screening and revisions to prenatal stress testing and counseling.

The task force is still meeting for weeks, said Krist, who is no longer part of the panel. But the panel usually only votes on recommendations during three formal meetings. He said the group usually issues 20 to 25 recommendations a year, but last year it published about five.

“It’s a very life-saving recommendation,” said Krist. “For therapists, the workforce is kind of our North Star in what to do and what not to do to prevent.”

This team is called by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services. The uncertainty surrounding the panel comes as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reshaped some of the organization’s advisory groups.

Last June, Kennedy replaced all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration’s Committee on Immunization and the Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) has also scaled back its public meetings.

Kennedy has the authority to appoint and fire members of the Preventive Services Task Force as well. According to a Wall Street Journal report last July, he privately criticized the team for being “woke.” Two people familiar with the internal discussions told NBC News that month that Kennedy was considering removing all of its members. In a letter dated July 27, the American Medical Association urged Kennedy to keep the panel intact.

An HHS spokesman did not respond to questions about whether changes to the task force were still being considered or whether the task force would meet in March.

Dorit Reiss, a law professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said that the work of this group has long been intended to stay out of politics.

“Like ACIP, the USPSTF was created to provide unbiased, science-based expert advice on a matter that should be controlled by science,” Reiss said. “Their main job is to provide guidance to doctors. Politicizing the team destroys that job. Doctors, ideally, will not be inclined to follow the guidance of a deliberately biased team.”

The team faced political backlash a few years ago, when conservative groups sued HHS over the panel’s “A” rating of the HIV prevention pill known as PrEP. The case threatened the ACA’s mandate to protect, but the Supreme Court sided with the federal government, upholding the requirement that insurers cover the services recommended by the panel.

In total, the task force has 54 recommendations to be insured. It includes yearly mammograms to screen for breast cancer starting at age 40, anxiety screening for children starting at age 8, and statins for certain patients ages 40 to 75 with at least one risk factor for heart disease to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.

Dr. Robert Lawrence, the group’s first chairman when it started four decades ago, said the group is also looking at how health risks differ among people, including LGBTQ people and black women, who face higher maternal mortality rates than white women. He said he was worried that such a job would be dismissed by Kennedy as “waking up.”

“Given RFK Jr.’s advocacy of science on the vaccine issue and many other issues at HHS, I believe the same fate could befall the task force,” Lawrence said. He co-authored an opinion paper published Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine that says disbanding the task force would be “an existential threat to clinical practice.”

The task force’s recommendations are usually updated every five years as new research becomes available. Without regular meetings, Lawrence said, reviews could be delayed.

A smaller team could also slow the team’s ability to review evidence and issue new recommendations, he said.

“I’m afraid of going back to the dark ages before there was evidence-based medicine,” he said.